Humphrey Clucas

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Humphrey Clucas (born 1941) is a British composer.

Clucas read English at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar. Having taught English in schools for twenty-seven years, while maintaining a separate singing career, he finally gave up teaching on his appointment as a Lay Vicar (member of the choir) of Westminster Abbey, from which he retired in 1999.

As a composer he is self-taught, and though he is well known for a set of responses, written as an undergraduate, nearly all his serious work has been done in the last twenty-five years. He has written a great deal of choral music, much of it liturgical; between May and December 2000, for instance, he wrote settings of the evening canticles (Magnificat and Nunc dimittis) for Westminster Abbey and for Ripon and Southwark Cathedrals, and a morning canticle (the Benedictus) for Guildford. But there are also concert works for unaccompanied choir (including a Requiem), a Housman song cycle for countertenor, a Clarinet Sonatina published by Lengnick, and a growing series of pieces for double bass.